Hugo Clarification Time

It is that time of year when people do Hugo recommendation podcasts in which they say things along the lines of, “I haven’t got a clue what the rules actually are, but if I say anything wrong I’m sure that Kevin Standlee and Cheryl Morgan will correct me”. In order to head some of this off at the pass, here are a few useful links.

Firstly it is not true that no one knows what magazines are eligible for Semiprozine any more. Nor is it the case that there are only a handful of semiprozines that are still eligible. You can find a list of eligible works here.

In both of these cases, if you think you should be on the list and are not, contact the people who run those websites, not me.

There is a real problem with Editor: Long Form, as most publishing houses still don’t credit editors. The SF Editor Wiki was intended to combat this, but in addition to the spam issues it simply wasn’t getting updated, which is why I was happy to let it die. I’ll try to do some research on who edited popular novels from 2012.

May I please point out that, while Writertopia certainly does maintain a list, the list is headed with the following declaration: “2013 eligible authors should contact us for inclusion in the list.”

Based on my experience of the past two years, although everyone on the list is certainly eligible, not everyone who is eligible is necessarily on the list. Please, debut authors, contact the nice people at Writertopia and get on the list! Otherwise, I (and possibly others as well) will assume you published a story somewhere in an outlying year and are ineligible, and I will not nominate you, when I very well might have done!